Snow and The Stranger

Rush hour was over. Most passengers had stepped from the subway train, but their heat still clung to each carriage: abandoned benches warm to the touch and straphangers stretching for a lover’s hand.

Maxim was fast asleep: body turned sideways, long legs entwined like an overgrown insect; deaf even to the bass throbbing through his headphones. Only the constant rubbing of a package, wrapped in yellow plastic and propped against his hip, made him stir. His eyes flickered open. 

“He said it’s yours.“ said the woman across the aisle.

He pulled the headphones from his ears. “What?”

“Yours. The man sitting next to you. He said it’s yours.” She was one of only four people left in the carriage. Plump, moon faced, with inquisitive eyes; her blond hair hanging like a valance beneath a grey fur hat.

“What man?”

“The one who was next to you. He got on at Tolstova. I saw him holding it. I said when he got off, ‘Excuse me, you’ve forgotten your bag.' I said. It’s not my bag he said, it’s his. He pointed at you.”

“What did he look like?

She shrugged her shoulders. “Like everyone else. Except he had a limp.”

“A limp.” Maxim peered at the package: a bright yellow bag from Billa supermarket taped around an oblong box.

“Are you alright?” asked the woman.

He looked up: a blue smock peeped beneath her coat. She must be a nurse, or medical orderly of some kind. She was staring. She knows I’m stoned. She’s looking in my eyes. “Yeah.” he nodded. “I’m fine.” He ran his hands back and forth over the package, the way people stroke a dog they’d rather not touch.

“I wouldn’t if I were you.” The woman was getting up to leave. “There’s some funny people about. Tell the guard when you get off.“ She gazed doubtfully as the train hummed to a halt at Minska Station. “Unless you want me to tell her?”

He shook his head, the rest of her question lost beneath an automated announcement. She continued to stare from the platform after the doors had closed. Do I look that shitfaced? whispered Maxim. The next stop was his. 

He took a deep breath of stale air as the train pulled into Obolon. He held the package to his ear. No ticking. Light as a feather, but something inside was shifting around, like a paperback. He grinned. Maybe it was a Bible? Probably some kind of religious weirdo, this man with the limp. What’s the worst that can happen? A bomb with no tick? So I get blown up. A smile crossed his face as he raced up a broken escalator to the street. At least he’d see his father again.

Chill air pinched his cheeks as he left the station. Kyiv’s evening greeting. Snowflakes fluttered through the air like lighted candles and shop signs hurled waves of color against a white sidewalk. A full moon hung above, spraying the snowy square like a searchlight hunting for fugitives among the huddled passersby. Maxim tossed the yellow package up and down in the palm of his hand. If only he could gather the strength to launch it skywards, watch it smack the moon’s face and explode: a billion powdery flakes tumbling down to bury the earth below. Then everyone would know the truth: the moon’s just a ball of white shit waiting to bury our dreams.

Maxim lived with his mother: a three roomed apartment halfway up a high rise; one of six, squeezed in a symmetrical row between a run-down playground and a new shopping mall. He could still remember his excitement on the day they moved in; washed ashore on an exotic island, each bare room bulging with adventure. Father was alive then. Now each room seemed no wider than the lift that took him there. Sometimes Maxim wondered if the apartment was shrinking: rooms marching to a silent beat, ready to crush his bones between the walls while he slept. 

He turned the key and stared, sightless, into the hall’s dense darkness. The air was warm and thick with disinfectant; its touch rough, like a kitten scratching his skin. Mother was out. Friday: her night for The Vodka Bar. She might be back by morning. Saturday March 1, Ukraine’s first day of Spring: the anniversary of father’s death. It didn’t feel as though twelve months had passed. It didn’t feel as if time had passed at all. He and his mother had simply stumbled through an open door into another world: a world where the sun still shone but they couldn’t feel it. The front door slammed shut behind him. 

He laid the yellow package on the kitchen table. The strip light glared down as if preparing to interrogate. He pulled a bread knife from the drawer and slit the bag. A cardboard shoe box lay inside, blank and colorless, secured by a band of thick black tape across the top. He cut the tape and lifted it open. Maxim lifted both hands to his head and stared. Inside sat a single running shoe; brand new, white with a swoosh logo. Lights and noise bombarded his brain. hurling him through the air in some wild, pulsating rave where revelers jostled his arms: wild eyed, sweat stained, screaming in his ears. He screwed his eyes shut and massaged his temples. The kitchen grew still. Only the shoe remained: glaring, tugging, dragging Maxim into a dream of his father.

“I will buy you such shoes Maximko! The best shoes. Nike Zoom. The M9. The very best.”

His father said that on the day he left to fight in the Donbass.

“One day you will hold them in your hands. I promise! Keep running! Keep training! Every day! Every day until I come home. Father is watching!”

Six months later Maxim had stood beside his mother, waiting to kiss the flag draped over father’s coffin. He touched the white shoe and saw father: the way his teeth flashed like pearls whenever he smiled; how the sun bleached his hair in the summer months; and his laugh: loud and long, head thrown back to face the sky as if the sun or moon were laughing too. Father! He sank to his knees, hands clutching the shoe, and sobbed. 

 Maxim awoke early the next morning. Sunrise. dirty brown at the edges, hung over Kyiv like a cheap orange blanket. He sat bolt upright, fully clothed on his unmade bed, the shoe still on his left foot. Saturday! His favorite day when father was alive. He could still hear the drone of the blender as father prepared a fruit smoothie - the fridge was always full - while Maxim stretched or skipped on the balcony. His dry tongue tingled: how those flavors used to gather on his tongue and pour gleefully down his throat. He even recalled the slam of the fridge door: that thud of rubber, like a siphon draining oxygen from the air. That’s how running used to feel: pressure in the chest; harder and harder until he could push no more. One shoe. One shoe from nowhere left by a stranger. A prank? Everyone loved father. A promise? A miracle? Or half a miracle. He fell back onto the bed. Saturdays were finished, dead: strangled by the weight of dope and beer at Oleg’s place. He turned his head from the window’s morning glare and held his breath. Mother was home. He knew by the stench of vomit creeping underneath his door. Sometimes he was almost grateful father was dead.

Maxim stretched his spidery legs into the snow, enjoying that faint crunch underfoot as he strode to Obolon station. Still early. Oleg would be asleep. He’d have to wake him up; call when the train reached Garadok. Last night’s chill had slid from the air. Even the frost that clung to roofs and trees was retreating like a battered army. The snow, for so many months piled high in the gutters, seemed to blink nervously at the morning sun. Maxim stood at the top of the empty subway steps and gazed into the station. He pressed his fingers against the rucksack strapped to his shoulders and felt for the shoe inside. The wind blew an empty coke can against his trainers. He trod on it - hard - and kicked it down the stone steps; then turned around, lengthening his stride toward the river and Natalka Park as the tin can rattled to a rest.

If father was here they’d take the subway to the all weather track at Spartak Stadium. The running track at Natalka would be closed for sure. Even if security had forgotten to lock the gates the cinder track could be sunk in pools of icy water. And even if the track was clear he only had one shoe. Maxim peered at his legs. The only place he had run for twelve months was up a broken escalator. 

He wound his way past the cathedral’ s golden dome; through snow brushed streets glittering in the sunlight, until he reached the riverbank. Ice still covered the water, but cracks ran in black veins from shore to shore. And the park’s slopes, two weeks before wrapped in snow deep enough to swallow your feet, flashed green spots like polka dots on a girl’s white dress.

The track nestled in a small valley circled by trees, bare and begging for Spring, He stopped at the top of the slope. Of course it was closed. Locked. The snow, though, seemed ready to loosen its grip. Though banked around the track in man sized heaps it looked bedraggled, like his childhood snowmen: all missing heads and gaping mouths. In places he even glimpsed the cinder, flat and dark between the sparkling snow as if both understood that times were changing. 

He had started to shuffle, half sideways, down the slope to the rusted gate when he saw something on the track’s edge, poking like a yellow tongue from the middle of a pile of snow. He stopped, then broke into a run, almost tripping as it came into focus: the Billa logo, same as last night.

His hand trembled when he touched the bag, as if the snow and ice held teeth to bite or snatch it back. He pulled harder and the bag fell to the ground. He poked it with his toe. No box like last night: this was a plain, wrapped package. For a moment he watched. Maybe it would disappear; slide into the ground like a fat yellow worm. Then the sky would crack with laughter as some evil god rejoiced at his misery. Maxim waved his fists at the sun and screamed, wishing he could tear it from the sky. What kind of joke is this? Why torture me? Who hates me this much? He began to claw at the bag like a scavenger, ripping at layers of bubble wrap until a shoe sat in his hand: a shoe to match the one in his bag.

If he looked hard enough he could see father, two summers ago - in the middle of the track, stopwatch in hand - studying his action for lap after lap until he completed 5,000 metres. Mother used to say they were crazy; that in summer he’d die from heatstroke or in winter collapse from pneumonia. Father laughed, the way he always did. Champions never find excuses, he'd say. Champions find a way. Maxim took the other shoe from his bag, clasped them both to his face, fell to his knees and cried. 

“Maxim!”

A man’s voice called from the slopes behind him. He heard, but it meant nothing; as though the wind were picking up and shaking a few branches.

“Maxim! Father is watching.”

Maxim turned around; still on his knees, shoes clamped to his face. A man stood at the top of the slope. Tall, black beanie hat and leather jacket. Maxim rose from the snow; the long, slow movement of someone leaving a dream. The man looked strangely lopsided, as if one foot were in a ditch.

“Who are you?”

“You think names matter?”

“How do you know me?”

“You ask the wrong questions Maxim.” He lifted his face to the sky, as though amused. “Of engines we ask how. Of life we ask why.”

Maxim held the shoes out before him, like an offering to a priest. “Why?

“Because father is watching.”

Blood rushed through Maxim’s body like a gas flame bursting into life. His legs stretched and he ran toward the stranger.

“Stop!” The stranger held out a hand and hollered down the slope. 

Maxim stopped, halfway between the track and the foot of the slope, legs trapped as if bumping against a glass door. The man’s face fell into focus. A dark, sallow complexion; chin shadowed and unshaven; his jaw and cheekbones carved with worry lines like the cracks in the icy river.

“Ok.” called Maxim. “You come closer.”

“Why?”

“To hear you better: make it easier.”

“Easy? You want easy? Skip school. Smoke crack. Get drunk. Blame your mother. The government. Putin. Fate. Anyone. Blame them all! That’s easy. That's why you do it. But to run in the snow; when the air’s so thin you cannot breathe; when your chest aches and your legs scream. That’s not easy. Being your father’s son is not meant to be easy.”

“He’s dead!”

“No Maxim. You are.”

Maxim took a short step backwards. Any closer and the words would punch too hard. He looked right and left, as if pleading for help.

“Why not just wake me on the train? Talk! Like a normal person.”

“And you would listen? Like a normal person?” He pulled the beanie hat from his head and wiped his brow. The sun shed little heat, but the air held no chill. “Have you told your mother?”

“Yes.”

Maxim watched the stranger take a deep breath and lower his head. A deep scar ran across his shaven scalp. “Why do you lie to me Maxim?”

“I...I can't talk to her.”

“Try. The world chokes on misunderstandings. Why feed it more?”

Maxim bit his lower lip. “She’s a drunk.”

“And what are you? Never lie Maxim. Truth will find you.”

He didn't answer. His ears caught a sound midway between a rustle and a shuffle. Snow had melted on a few of the branches and slid to the ground.

“Fear is a bully. Fight back.” He replaced his hat roughly, as if it had somehow annoyed him. “Or spend your life doing what bullies tell you.”

“I'm scared.”

“We’re all scared. You think father wasn't?”

Silence hugged the valley, crushing the words in Maxim’s throat. Neither he nor the stranger moved.

“You weren’t at his funeral.” spluttered Maxim, as if suddenly offended.

The stranger slapped his leg. “I was waiting for this.” He grinned as though introducing a friend, allowing Maxim’s stare to linger. “Your father lived for you. Turn around. Look at the track. He is here now. Father is watching.”

Maxim turned and saw father: that winter’s day when they ripped off their shoes and ran barefoot. His feet tingled. How the powdery snow had crumbled and slid between his toes! He sank, knees pressed in the snow, clutching the shoes to his eyes and sobbing. The tears felt different now. No desolation; just father’s voice, his smile and the comfort of memory. 

When he turned around the stranger was gone. He ran to the top of the slope, but found no sign of him. In the distance he saw only trees, snow, the river and the Cathedral’s golden dome, hanging over Kyiv like the yolk of a perfect egg. He sat down, pulled off his socks and trainers and stuffed them into his bag; concealing those white shoes in the tattered remains of bubble wrap. Maxim smiled and began to run, legs stretching, faster and faster, barefoot in the snow toward the subway. The Spartak Stadium would be open soon. Father was watching